AuthorTopic: Coast-to-coast Road Trips (Read 1713 times)

That's sort of a dream of mine to do that. I don't know anybody whose done a coast-to-coast trip, but my grandparents once did a trip from Cincinnati to California and back, and my brother once took a Greyhound bus from Tacoma, WA to Dayton, OH after moving out to Washington with a woman, and then later breaking up with her and returning back to Ohio.

During the years I lived in California, I’d fly home to Pennsylvania every few months or so, but I’d also drive back almost annually. So I’ve probably made the coast-to-coast drive close to ten times. Most of these were via I-80—which from S.F. to Williamsport is logical. A few trips were in winter, and in those cases, I took the southern route via Bakersfield and Barstow then across the combined I-40/44/70 corridor.

Once I made the trip eastward in April, and I thought I’d be OK using I-80, but a surprise late-season snowstorm resulted in the closure of an I-80 segment in Wyoming. I didn’t know this at the time, and having stayed overnight in Salt Lake City the previous night, I spent the morning driving toward a dead end halfway across Wyoming only to have to turn around, go back to Salt Lake, then take I-15 and cut the corner from Provo to Green River and follow I-70 through the Colorado mountains to Denver. Honestly, I was dangerously tired as I was approaching Denver some 15 hours after I set out that morning.

I certainly preferred the I-80 route over I-40/44/70 and always looked forward to all of the familiar landmarks along the way—Culver’s country, Iowa 80, Little America, Bonneville Salt Flats, and so on. But to be fair to the I-40/44/70 corridor, I had grown a little tired of it on several earlier drives from PA to Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas.

When I moved from S.F. to Tampa, I got to make that drive twice in one week—once in the one-way rented truck, and a second time in my own vehicle. With the moving truck, I took I-10 basically straight across—coming just about 140 miles shy of clinching the entire length of I-10 in one trip. Just for variety, I did an odd dogleg from I-40 to I-20 to I-10—can’t remember exactly how offhand.